Stevan Litobac

A while ago I read the book “On Writing Well” by William K. Zinsser. A fantastic book on how to write non-fiction. Amongst the many suggestions made in the book, there is one suggestion that I find most useful: skip the first paragraph.

Most of us struggle to write the first paragraph and ‘introduce’ our topic. Zinsser suggests to just do away with the first paragraph and start by writing the second paragraph, the meat of the subject matter.

I would offer to extend that gem of advice and suggest that it applies to when reading material as well.

The Safari 4 Beta brought some much needed improvements to the browser, and the changes are noticable. The browser is snappier, more intuitive and has moved its relationship with the web standards to the next level. Great, except the tabs are frustrating to use at times.

When clicking between tabs, roughly 1/3 of the time I end up very subtly triggering its “dragging” action, instead of bringing the tab to focus. So over time I learnt to expect that to happen and try to click a second time in fairly quick succession.

This works most of the time, except when I click it too quickly the second time it minimises the browser. Useless functionality if you ask me. I’m not convinced the whole double-clicking to minimise is that useful, or even desired that often. Any way you look at it, the tabs are far from ideal in their current state.

Apple announced firmware version 3.0 for the iPhone yesterday, and the whole blogosphere was abuzz about the new features it brings. Except this time Steve Jobs wasn’t being mentioned at all.

Perhaps Steve Jobs was right in stepping off the limelight and allow “Apple to deliver extraordinary products“, as Apple have managed to generate excitement around a ‘deliverable’, rather than the ‘deliverer’.

So someone over at Audible decided to offer Seth Godins‘ latest book, Tribes, for free. Not sure how long this promotion will go on for, so get it while it’s hot!

You’ll need an Audible.com account, which is free and doesn’t take too long to create.

“You have everything you need to build something far bigger than
yourself. The people around you notice this and they’re ready to follow if you’re ready to lead.” – Seth Godin

NYTimes posted an interview with the social psychologist, Daniel Gilbert. The best part is this quote:

“Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. [...] One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t. [...] People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No.“

On a related note, It struck me recently how there are more and more companies selling experiences as gifts.

I’ve recently had to hastily pass my practical driving test as my theory test certificate was about to expire. It’s a little well known fact that some areas are well known for their long waiting periods. Hello Isleworth in London. There’s a 1-2 month waiting list as standard for that test center, which is just too long and would tip me over my theory expiration date.

So I decided to book any date (to have a failsafe, plus a booking reference is required to update a booking), and whip up a little script that logs into the DSA booking service, search for better dates in 2 areas (Ashford and Isleworth for me) and email me if anything good pops up.

The script is written in Python and uses the great BeautifulSoup library. It’s a little rough around the edges as I didn’t plan on releasing it, and I’m certain that the code is nowhere near its potential beauty and elegance. My apologies!

Download: dsa.py

I haven’t tested it on Windows (and doubt it would work on it without some tweaking), I’ve only tested it on Linux and Mac OS. If you need a hand at running it, leave a comment. I found and booked a test in Isleworth that was 10 days away on the 2nd day of running the script.

“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” – Salvador Dali

“I’m in a permanent state of intellectual erection.” – Salvador Dali

I’ve read an interesting book called ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’ (: US | UK), by Robert B. Cialdini. It outlines 6 universal “weapons of influence” that are used to persuade people, and how to defend yourself against them:

1. Reciprocation: The Old Give and Take… and Take
2. Commitment and Consistency: Hobgoblins of the Mind
3. Social Proof: Truths Are Us
4. Liking: The Friendly Thief
5. Authority: Directed Deference
6. Scarcity: The Rule of the Few

A good example of this is the labelling technique, which falls under ‘Commitment and Consistency’. It involves assigning a trait, attitude, or belief to a person and then making a request of that person that’s consistent with that label. In practice, for example, this could translate to you telling someone that you consider them to be an above-average citizen that is likely to vote and participate in political events. They would then see themselves a bit differently, as a better citizen, maybe even one that votes!

A more useful example can be used when talking to customer service agents. Knowing that they can sometimes be less-than-helpful when you ask for a tough request, try telling them that “you’re so happy with the service so far that you’re going to write a positive letter or email about your interaction to his or her supervisor as soon as you get off the phone”. If they’re human, they will be more likely to reciprocate the respect and try harder to help you with your request.

I’m currently reading the sequel, titled ‘Yes!: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion’ (: US | UK), where it basically lists 50 great examples of the 6 persuasive principals above. It’s like a goody bag, but in book form!

With everyone working harder and harder in achieving “beautiful design” zen, it may be hard to believe that a design lacking in creative beauty may subconsciously attract more visitors/users. But it’s true!

If you’re a tech-head, consider Norton Ghost and its hard drive imaging application. Do you trust the windows desktop application version, or the DOS version? I prefer the latter — it just feels more stable and single-purposed.

If you’re not a tech-head, then consider Mr Kishore Biyani, an Indian retailer who revamped his shops to make them look cluttered and disorganised. His target market — lower middle-class customers — felt like the goods were fresh and felt more at home in the ‘mess’. “The shouting, the untidiness, the chaos is part of the design,” says Mr. Biyani.

Could your product or service benefit from a messy design?

The Future of Online Advertising conference came and went, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I admit I should have blogged about it at the time but I was busy soaking in all its goodness!

So I’ve decided to do the next best thing and brain dump a few interesting facts, moments, or whatever you want to call them, in a list.

• Video advertising is the next big thing. Not the 30-sec ad kind, but where you can click on an item in a video clip, like a t-shirt somebody is wearing, and more information displays, where you can amongst other things – buy that same t-shirt.
• VideoClix demonstrated a product that that allows you to do this at the conference, and it works pretty well.
• Microsoft adLab is fairly useful. Even though I’d say only about 5-or so people actually knew about it before the conference. Check out the ‘Demographics Prediction’, ‘Search Funnels’, and ‘Search Volume Forecasting’. Still hard to believe it’s a free offering from Microsoft!
• Digg co-founder Jay Adelson gave a talk on ‘Tapping into the Advertising Potential of New Media’, which was fairly interesting. He played the Fred and Barney smoking Winston’s cigarettes clip. That brought some things in perspective in a funny and surreal way.
• Mike Hudack from blip.tv skipped some of his slides to avoid paparazzi-style sneaky pics being taken of his treasured bar graphs.
• Jim Coudal from ‘The Deck‘ and ‘Coudal Partners‘ gave a very inspiring and funny talk on how things work at The Deck. One 120×90 ad per page per day, and only of services that The Deck have personally tried. That’s it. The advantage? Readers enjoy the clean layout, Advertisers don’t compete for attention on a page, and the site owner gets a fair cut. I was actually looking forward to his talk from the beginning as I had seen him in the viral video, ‘Copy Goes Here‘
• Met some interesting people. Namely Darren Rowse from Problogger, Andrej Nabergoj, and Chris Hart.

Overall it was a very refreshing week away in New York with my cousin Ivan. I’ll upload a few pictures on here soon.